Troops are preparing to withdraw as a peace of sorts descends, yet all the elements for civil war remain. Barack Obama will need all the goodwill he can garner
Toby Dodge
The Observer
December 21, 2008
George W Bush, barely a month away from leaving office, flew to Baghdad last weekend for an eight-hour visit. On Wednesday, it was Gordon Brown’s turn. The arrival of president and prime minister in the Iraqi capital is part of a concerted effort to draw a line under the debacle that Iraq has become for the American and British governments. After nearly six years of occupation, Bush was keen to stress the progress he claimed had been made.
“The Iraq we’re standing in today is dramatically freer, dramatically safer and dramatically better,” he told American troops. Brown was a little more circumspect, simply declaring: “We leave Iraq a better place.” The startling actions of Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaidi in throwing his shoes at Bush indicates that all is not as positive as Bush would have the world believe. There is a grave danger that by overstating the good news from Iraq, both Bush and Brown are making a return to civil war more likely.
I have been travelling back and forth to Iraq for the last seven years. I witnessed the violent aftermath of the invasion in the spring of 2003 when looting and lawlessness descended into an all out insurgency. I returned in 2007 to see a country in the midst of civil war. On my last trip to Iraq this year, the population was holding its breath, waiting to see if the internecine strife had finished or simply stalled while all sides rearm.
Bush and Brown’s visits were heralded by what could be a final date for both US and British troops to go home. The agreement between Baghdad and Washington, passed by the Iraqi parliament at the end of November, should see US combat troops removed from all Iraqi cities by June and then out of the country entirely by the end of 2011. Britain’s remaining 4,000 soldiers in Basra will leave Iraq by July. With an end to the occupation in sight, both Bush and Brown are attempting to put the best possible gloss on a military adventure that has seen 178 British and 4,209 Americans troops killed and anything between 90,000 and 650,000 Iraqi deaths.
Anglo-American declarations of progress and stability need to be treated with caution. Even today, Iraq is far from peaceful; an average of 500 people are murdered each month, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Baghdad at the end of 2008 is a deeply divided city. Neighbourhoods that were religiously and ethnically cleansed by the wave of violence that engulfed the city before 2007 are now fortified by row upon row of concrete blast walls.
Bush “surged” US troops at the beginning of 2007 to reduce violence and trigger some form of political reconciliation and a negotiated settlement. This is yet to happen, so there is a real danger all-out conflict could reignite. Bush and Brown are loathe to use the term “civil war” to describe what took place in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 but this is exactly what happened.
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